


Exit Stage Left - The Other Holmes Boy

by Teaandcakes



Category: Sherlock (TV), Sherlock Holmes & Related Fandoms
Genre: Brotherly Love, Canonical Character Death, Kidlock, Masturbation, Piratelock, Protective Mycroft
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2014-09-19
Updated: 2014-09-19
Packaged: 2018-02-18 01:01:48
Rating: Mature
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 3
Words: 11,236
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/2329502
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Teaandcakes/pseuds/Teaandcakes
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>This is a prequel fic to the Beyond Ourselves series and dovetails with the events in the series but can be read standalone.</p><p>It explores why there is an erased line in 'family' in Sherlock's psychiatric records; why Mycroft is so threatening when Sherlock complains he wouldn't need to father an Holmes heir if Sherry was still alive. </p><p>In other words, what happened late one summer afternoon, when Sherry was twelve, Mycroft eleven and William (Sherlock) four? And why did it change Mycroft so much?</p>
            </blockquote>





	1. Three Brothers

'I could go with you.'

'Ohhhhh no Lockie Bee, no you really couldn't. You have to stay with Nanny, you know you do. It's nearly your bedtime, anyway and she needs to check you with the nit comb again because you're a dirty nitty little wretch.'

William's lower lip started to wobble. He looked defiant, though.

'You're not nice to me. Nanny says nits only like clean hairs.'

He still looked as if he might cry.

'Please, Myc?'

'No, Bee, you have to go to bed. But you can come with us tomorrow morning. We won't be able to get much done tonight, we're really just collecting the materials for the gangplank. You can come tomorrow when we fix it all together. But you have to wear the life jacket.'

Pouting, William sat down on the floor, even though it was still filthy from his earlier experiment with a flowerpot and some worms that he'd brought in because it had started raining. The dirt was still here, smeared now, but he wasn't sure where the worms had gone. He hoped they didn't reappear when the cook was carrying anything hot. That had happened with some beetles when the other Cook had been here, with the unfortunate outcome of the need for a new Cook .

'S'not fair....'

'I know Bee. Such is the stuff of our ultimately sorrowful and pointless transitory existence. But if you're good now, I'll ask Sherry if he'll show you his catapult tomorrow? He got a squirrel with it today.'

'I know THAT, Mycroft, he let me have it.'

'What? The catapult? No...... The squirrel? What on earth for?'

'I don't know, to see? I wanted to see how it worked, and the live ones won't let me catch them. They run up the trees. The gardener cut it open for me so I could see the insides. They were all warm and perfect and they were BEAUTIFUL, Myc.'

'Um...ok? I think? Jolly strange thing, you are, aren't you? Are you sure you're my brother, I think you might have been hatched somewhere by the fairies, and hidden under the gooseberry bush for Mummy to find? Here's Sherry now. Remember, be good for Nanny and you can come with us tomorrow. Night, night Bee!'

Pout again. No one could pout like this one.

'Night Mycie.'

................

The small figure trailed back to the kitchen, thumb in his mouth, blankie scrunched round his arm. He hoped there might be a chance of a biscuit, if he used his pale almond eyes and ability to look very, very sad to best effect. William Holmes was no stranger to manipulating adults. Often, his biscuit reward was a superior variety with chocolate. Once it was a Wagon Wheel. He was good at what he did....

William knew Nanny would be having tea with the cook; tea with a "little bit of something for the nerves", Sherlock had noticed.....At four, he already noticed things like that. How Nanny's hand shook before she had her "special tea" and not afterwards. How she was angry with him more often these days, a bit rougher, a bit more impatient. 

He preferred it really, on her nights off, when it was usually Mycroft who looked after him and put him to bed. Mycroft was his only real friend; the kindest of all elder brothers, who smoothed his hair and wiped his nose, comforted him when he fell off walls, out of trees, into things he should not have been in and often retrieved him from under things he apparently should not have ever been in the path of in the first place because he had been Told More Than Once.

It was Mycroft, also, who helped him hide his collection of precious things. The wizened dessicated sad little corpses of frogs and baby birds. The prehistoric arrowhead from the little quarry pit. His collection of unusual stones and feathers. And unusual buttons, though those were really Mummy's and she didn't know he had them. Oh, yes, and the dessicated animal droppings, which had proved to be one of his less popular obsessions.

It was Mycroft too, who told him why he should do things he didn't fancy, which was quite a lot of things that adults thought he should be doing. More often, why he should sometimes not do the things that William, that wild and freespirited dryad, thought would be enormous fun. 

Like playing by the river or in the woods by himself without Mycroft to supervise, or stealing things that didn't belong to him, or that thing he had done more than once with all the bottles in the bathroom being emptied into the bathtub and stirred together with a dirty stick brought in from the garden, to make a whole new range of pharmaceutical products which sadly resembled a massive slick of beige sludge and smelt only of mouthwash and hair conditioner.

Mycroft smelt nicer than the sludge experiment. He smelt of soap, sometimes sweat and occasionally of cigarettes. Of proper boy. Most importantly, Mycroft smelt entirely and wholly of security, certainty and safety. With his parents away so much and busy when they were here, Mycroft was the constant shining star in William's bright sky.  
...........

For now, the small curly-haired (possibly changeling) child, took the chance to slip into the larder room whilst the staff were still gossiping and ignoring his wide biscuit-begging eyes, to eat tiny sugar flowers peeled carefully from their rice-paper backing and to stick his finger in the tins of golden syrup, prised open with the penny he kept in his shorts pockets for that specific purpose. 

He didn't dare molest the jam tarts; they were new-made and delicious looking but they were arranged disappointingly symmetrically and there were equal numbers of each flavour: strawberry, blackcurrant and his own favourite, lemon curd. He knew this military order of sweet pastry was the direct result of previous tart-related incidents, most notably when he'd eaten most of a tray of them and managed to tip the rest on the floor. That had led to a Great Deal of Crossness, as well as a tummy-ache. He sighed, and settled for snuffling at them and just eating a tiny bit of pastry overhang, on the tin-foil case of one of those at the back.

He frowned at the Marmite jar and pulled his sleeve right over his hand to push it to the back of the shelf. It was smeary, smelly and he didn't like it. Sherry liked Marmite a lot. Perhaps it made him big and strong, that might be part of the reason he didn't look like William or Mycroft, maybe, but even if so William wasn't going to pay that high a price to be like Sherry. He didn't even like the smell of it.

These were the days, back then, when William was a picky eater but was still, at least, an eater. It was rare for a day to pass without him being smeared in something he had stolen, or picked from a hedge, or bought from the sweetie shop. 

Mycroft kept a hanky specially for wiping William's face clean of his latest edible finds. If there was no water handy, he would lick the hanky and wipe the sticky face anyway. William let him do it, but always tried to blow his nose into the clean cotton sheet without Mycroft noticing......Mycroft always noticed.

.............

Sherry never did the sorts of things Mycroft did to amuse William. 

Sherrinford was a single year older then Mycroft, but worlds apart. He was as dark haired as William, not strawberry-gingery like Mycroft and he was tall, like they all were in the Holmes clan. But unlike both of them, slim and serious, Sherry was broad-browed and smiling. Where the younger Holmes were slender boughs, Sherrinford was a strong wrought trunk, built to withstand all challenge and all life's storms.

William was both afraid of Sherry and worshipped the ground he trod. He seemed, to the four year old trailing after him, to be like a warrior prince, so grown up. Like the characters in his story books. Unfortunately, it wasn't mutual, this admiration. Sherry wasn't interested in William and found him a bloody nuisance. He left all that wet-nursing stuff to Mycroft, whom Sherry found acceptable as a companion, if a bit feeble. 

And Sherry wasn't remotely interested in academic work, either. He was bold and brave and a bit boorish. Given time, he would have been a classic rugger-bugger at Eton, all drinking games and mooning in the back window of the coach taking the team to the away matches. 

................

At Oxford, he would read PPE, or more likely Theology. He wasn't remotely interested in Theology, apart from those verses in Leviticus banning certain behaviours and which conjured up visions of just those behaviours, but everyone knew it was piss-easy to get into a PPH for Theology, if you couldn't get into a proper college due to lacking a bit of the grey matter. Though the monks were admittedly more than a bit of a cock-block, where entertaining ladies was concerned. 

Sherrinford would have been awarded a full Blue for rugby and rowing; would have been elected a member of the Grid(iron Club) and the Bullingdon as well, squeezing his broad shoulders into the dandy formalwear, and wreaking havoc by moonlit night in Carfax and the Broad. In the Botanic gardens, too, felling palm trees. Taunting townies with ostentatious excess......Painting zebra crossings at night across The High between The Queen's and Univ, predictably getting caught due to the trail of white paint footprints leading all the way back to his rooms. Result: Rustication number one. 

Posting pigeons through the letter boxes of enemies during the vac, fed on grain laced with laxatives. Pouring water and then mustard-and-cress seeds through other letterboxes, to grow a crop on their carpets...Result: Rustication number two. 

Ordering fifteen prawn cocktails in the Gate or the Garden Indian restaurants and then arguing with the long-suffering waiters, claiming they hadn't understood good English and that he'd actually ordered a Tandoori chicken and Keema Naan with raita.....

You get the picture...

Given time, Sherrinford would have been and done, all of these exasperating, sometimes amusing, life-embracing activities.

He was to do none of them.

..................

Sherry was also, from his earliest days, completely and undeniably straight as a die. He never even had the boyish phase of saying girls were 'eurgh' and wiping his hands on his shorts after he'd touched one. 

At twelve, he already had a first girlfriend, Lucy. And he took the precaution of a backup girlfriend, Bella, in case Lucy proved a disappointment. He had felt right inside a bra and he had done 'tongues'. 

He masturbated noisily and energetically most nights, in his large draughty room above the library. His room was next to Mycroft's slightly smaller lodgings, Mycroft, who rolled his eyes and shook his head when the creaking started up and covered his head with a bolster pillow, or turned on the BBC World Service. Or both, if Sherry was having a really good night.

Mycroft understood, of course, about these things; but he rarely imitated his brother in this regard, not just because he was a little younger, but also because his aspirations to be in control of himself, were stronger than those of sexual desire, at least for now. 

And besides, it was all so terribly, terribly messy. So he drowned his brother's moans out with something stirring and Russian on the radio instead and concentrated on his Latin and Greek homework. Sometimes, this was the best distraction of all and he was very grateful that Homer had written as many as twenty-four books of the Iliad. The lyrical verse of the "wine-dark sea" was perfect nocturnal fare for those not fixated on the juvenile phallus.

William, at four, just played happily with his own tiny dick, seemingly oblivious that it had any other function than as a wee-wee producer, or convenient plaything. The glorious simplicity of life as a four year old. He'd seen his brothers' dicks, because they swam naked in the larger of the two Manor lakes in the summer, but didn't relate those bizarre monsters to his own fun-size offering. He thought maybe one day his tiny dick would drop off, and a big proper one would be there, or perhaps grow in its place, like a snake shedding its skin, or a butterfly emerging from a chrysalis. 

William was indeed, quite an odd child. He looked strange and he behaved more strangely. Many people had already remarked on this, some quite pithily, which made Mummy's eyes narrow. You didn't want to make Mummy's eyes narrow, William knew. He wondered why others didn't always realise that.

............

Sherry found his brother Mycroft a puzzle. Myc was a year younger than himself, true, but he found it odd that his brother was seemingly unmoved by the joys of the female flesh and the delights of the rugby field. Mycroft had eyes only for his schoolwork and his baby brother. 

Sherry was at Eton and Myc just about to join him, coming up a year early because of all the brain and the swotting. Sherrinford knew it would be only a matter of weeks before Mycroft pulled ahead of him in just about every subject. Sherry didn't mind that, too much, because he knew that swotting was all Mycroft had. Apart from William, of course, Yes, the only other thing Mycroft cared about, other than his blasted tedious studies, was his darling William. 

Sherry wasn't interested in William any more than he was in schoolwork. But it still made Sherrinford jealous, even though he could have had that relationship himself.

...............

Mummy hadn't even known she was expecting until she was over five months gone. She thought the menopause was starting early, throwing her mind and body into chaos. She fainted in the surgery when the kindly elderly doctor gleefully told her, that there was a very healthy baby in there, not a middle-aged womanly hormone soup. 

She drove home in the ageing Bentley with the top roof hood down, Hermes headscarf firmly knotted, sunglasses to counter the glare, weaving along the narrow country lanes even more than usual. Which was saying something, as she always was an extremely questionable driver, being more focused on mathematic problems or that product that deals with really severe pondweed infestations that Mr Holmes wanted, but that she'd forgotten yet again to get in Bristol, than any concept of lane discipline or adherence to the tedious strictures of the Highway Code.

She told her family the news that evening. Her husband, always more family focused than she, was amazed, but ecstatic. Sometimes, Violet wondered if he'd ever even made the connection between his energetic bedroom activities and the fact they had several children? Often, actually, she wondered this. He really was quite Vague. 

But he was the kindest man she ever knew and she loved him as much today as she had when he quietly and courteously swept her clean away from her first and very foolish and short-lived marriage, which had been to a man who was both cruel and mean and an opposite in all ways to her darling Siger.

Violet knew the depth of unhappiness of a bad relationship. It was part of the reason she took an open and liberal view to her children's own later romantic pairings. The only important thing for her, was that they were safe, and that they were happy. Of course, she wasn't always able to guarantee either, rarely in the end, but she could try.

.................

Her children's reactions to her bombshell were decidedly mixed. 

Mycroft was utterly delighted from day one. He craved intellectual company, and whilst he knew the new baby would be pretty useless on that front for years, with such a ridiculous seven year age-gap, there was still that germ of a possibility shining out for the future. 

And anyway, he longed for this baby, so that he could teach it things; important facts and information. And he could dress him up, (Mycroft was convinced it was another boy), so he always looked smart and proper and correct. No rompers and ghastly bright sweatshirts for this child. Mycroft would do his best to ensure he looked the proper Edwardian baby, all knickerbockers and sailor suits....if he had the Holmes curls he would be quite the picture.

And, just a little, Mycroft longed for this baby so that he could cuddle him, protect him and help him when he was sad or lonely. Mummy and Daddy didn't notice all the time when Mycroft was sad or lonely, they had been leaving the boys to raise themselves a lot of the time, due to Mummy's stellar academic career, and Daddy's wish to do everything he could to make Mummy happy, in return for her having taken time off from academia to have his children. 

They ran wild, which was great, but sometimes they fell, or were miserable. And then, they felt it, because there was only the thin and slender comfort of paid staff to fall back on and that really wasn't the same as Mummy or Daddy. 

Mycroft determined that it would not be the same for this new baby. William would have Mycroft. William would be loved. His comfort would be deep, and lasting.

.............

Sherry had been furious when he was told about the baby. 

Not only because of the thought of his actual parents having actual proper sex, at their actually revoltingly ancient age, was frankly quite disgusting; but also at the fact that he and Mycroft were likely to get even less of a share of Mummy and Daddy than they did now....

The freedom their parents had afforded the children had made Mycroft free to develop his personality. But Sherry? He was more feral than he was free. Not in a bad way, or a malicious way, but in an over-confident reckless way. His idea of seeing if something was safe, was to do it and then work out whether he'd been crushed to death or chopped an arm off. 

Sherry shouted and stomped his way through the house, then shoved his Wellington boots and his mac on, before huffing his way down to the woods to catapult tin cans on a tree branch until the rain and gathering dusk forced him back to the house, where everyone was so sickeningly Excited and Pleased and Myc looked like the cat who got the cream all evening. 

..............

It rained the day that baby William Sherlock Scott Holmes arrived home with Mummy from the hospital in Bath; it carried on raining for a whole week afterwards. 

Perhaps it was a sign?

The baby's second name, as well as his first, were a throwback to his notorious paternal great-grandfather, who had led a bizarre life; alternating between an early career as a barrister at the London Bar and his later life as a rather second-rate Barbary Coast pirate, in the days when that sort of business really wasn't what it had been and all the really good pirates had sensibly moved on to arms and drugs.

His renown with women was greater than his success with boarding well-laden ships, it seemed, such that, to this day, it is possible to see his descendants with his azure eyes and bright pale hair in coastal areas of North and Eastern Africa. 

He too was a William, but by the end of his days was universally known as "Sherlock", the "bright haired". He was buried in a huge marble sarcophagus tomb erected incongruously in the main square of a small village in Egypt and the local families made up of his descendants incredibly still tend his grave, scrubbing the marble when it discolours and leaving small posies of wild flowers, on the anniversary of his death.

It was Grand-mère, one of his legion offspring, but the only actually legitimate heir he managed to father, who insisted on this surprise late Holmes baby being named after the pirate lawyer. She had taken one look at the newborn William, all scrunched-up fury and spindly long fingers and toes and pronounced that he was a throw-back and a changeling child and the very image of her darling Daddy as a child, despite the hair colour and the fact that everyone knew she'd never seen an image of her darling Daddy as a child, in her long and eccentric existence on this Earth.

...........

But, since Grand-mère was notoriously crackers and a well known throwback herself, her predictions were heeded for the "sake of a quiet life" and the baby was saddled with the combination of mundane and extraordinary nomenclature. 

The only foot-putting-down, came when the order of names was decided. Mummy and Daddy insisted that they couldn't saddle the child with a name like Sherlock when his hair was dark, for heavens sake; so it would be a second name, a curiosity and he'd never have to use it in everyday life. He would be William, with Sherlock just recorded on paper, forgotten. A curiosity for him to make people laugh at cocktail parties and the Hunt Ball.

They didn't know, couldn't know; that one day this lonely son would grasp hold of that strange demoted name and cling onto its transformative qualities like a drowning man, emerging from his chrysalis of protective and hidden behaviours that anyone would struggle to label "normal". Using this name, his clothes and his scathing tongue to keep others away; his denial of appetites in order to cloak himself in a new protective shell. 

When this was not enough, using drugs to obliterate what his mind would not permit him to forget. 

...............

Sherry couldn't complain about the noise the baby made, though he'd have liked to, because William never, or hardly ever, cried at all. He simply lay in his crib, staring. And later, when a little older, he sat propped up, still staring. His pale eyes absorbing his surroundings. 

"Judging me", Sherry would have said. "Creepy". "Not like other kids". He still found something to complain about. That made Mycroft frown.

William learned to crawl. He became fractious and unhappy. Frustrated with the things he could not do (almost everything) and dissatisfied with the small number of things he could. He could not be consoled. He disliked loud noises, crowded places and screamed when his parents tried to make him go to Church with them on Sundays. A few months ago, after he turned four, they asked him why he didn't like church.

'It's a lie to keep people quiet. There is no God. It's made up, like "The Elves and the Shoemaker" is a story. Nice, but not true.'

His parents looked at each other and raised their eyebrows. He was four years old..... After that, they left him with Nanny on Sundays....Sherry resented William for that too, because Sherry had always had to go to Church and still did. 

Mycroft didn't mind Church, because there was music and there were words which were well-ordered and rhythmic and because he was fascinated with the inner workings of the church organ. 

The organist, a middle-aged loner, who lived with his elderly overbearing Mum, down in the little terraced Victorian canal-workers cottages near Trowbridge, offered to show Mycroft inside the organ loft one Sunday afternoon, but that he was not to tell his parents, as they might not want him coming home all dusty. Mycroft was delighted and agreed readily, excited at the prospect of poking around in the previously hidden and mysterious loft.

But Mummy found out, when she overheard him telling Sherrinford about it, and she said he couldn't go, though she didn't give a reason why, except to say that the organist "wasn't a very nice man". 

...............

Mycroft did find out the what "not a very nice man" actually meant, many years later, when searching for some newspaper clippings on a completely unrelated local story. It seemed that over the years, several local children had seen the dusty organ loft and a lot more besides.

It was a narrow escape and contributed to Mycroft's later guilt at being away and not realising what was happening with William, seven years later; but it also made him as a seventeen year old, deeply understanding of why his brother had not told, had not refused; had not stopped it all before it got to the ghastly and terrible state of affairs that it did. 

He understood the power of flattery and shared secrets, with which adults can surround a lonely child. 

...............

Mycroft's solution to William's growing discontent, was to smother the toddler with love. He brushed his fuzzy hair, bathed him, played with him. He spent his pocket money, what little they were given (since whilst wealthy, the Holmes did not believe in spoiling children, but took it a little too far the other way), on toys for William. 

But there was only one toy that William really ever paid much attention to; which was a poor quality and rather hideous stuffed bee that Mycroft won at the rather tatty August Bank Holiday travelling fair when Mycroft was ten and William was still just three. 

Being fairly immature himself, Mycroft initially intended to keep it. That was, until the small face next to him crumpled, dissolving into hysterical tears and a fist of narrow bony fingers reached out in mute supplication.

Mycroft could not deny William anything. It set a pattern for their whole lives.

..................

Nannies came and went, but mainly they went, because the house was cold, the hot water rarely very hot and the boys ideas of practical jokes were very trying. So it was Mycroft who taught William how to use the potty and then the toilet. 

It was perhaps unfortunate that William's curiosity with everything hidden and fascinating with the world, extended to detailed examination of his own bodily waste products; so that Mycroft was more than once presented at close quarters with a squashed up poo that William had cheerfully retrieved in order to show him "how soft it is" or "how runny this one was". And it was at times like these, when trying to remove the distinct and lingering smell of small human faeces from his Maths homework, that Mycroft might have been expected to wonder if Sherry hadn't had the right idea about William; a bloody nuisance to be avoided at all costs. 

But Sherry didn't have the talc-scented bath-times, when the room was warm and steamy, with a wriggling William raining smeary kisses onto Mycroft's face and hair. Didn't have the tucking up at night time half-hour when Mycroft sat by the truckle bed and read stories to William, his bee toy tucked in next to him, telling him all about the Greek gods and about Paddington, about Alice and Peter Pan and later the Swallows and Amazons, and the Famous Five.....the little boy rapt with attention, begging with big eyes for "just one more chapter". 

Sherry never had the pure, shining love that William gave Mycroft. Not a sociable boy, William represented Mycroft's closest earthly relationship. Not just of his childhood, but of his lifetime.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> The "Famous Five" books by Enid Blyton were period pieces even when William, Myc and Sherry were boys, with some rather un-PC stereotypes. But they were also ripping stories with great characters. Perhaps Sherlock identified with George, the lonely girl with a temper who didn't fit in and who sulked and scowled almost as much as William did? Who could resist, anyway, tales of gold ingots in dungeons and smugglers and secret underground passages? Not me, for sure, and not William. 
> 
> I describe Sherry in this chapter as "broad browed and smiling". This is a shameless theft from Rupert's Brooke's Sonnet of April 1909:  
> "...And watch you, a broad-browed and smiling dream,  
> Pass........"
> 
> The practical jokes described in Oxford are all things which have occurred over the years. And I cravenly apologise for my unforgivable rudeness to the PPHs (Permanent Private Halls) of Oxford University. Since they are mostly religious orders, I will probably now be damned for all eternity, but since I take Sherlock's view on religion, this will not trouble me unduly.


	2. Pirates, and a Pirate Ship

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> This is just a short chapter but that's how the pirate cookie crumbled for me....:-)

Out on the shadowy rippling river backwater, Sherrinford and Mycroft were transforming the aged and paint-faded clinker-built houseboat into a pirate ship, complete with supplies for a lengthy ocean voyage (well, to Freshford at the VERY least) and possible treasure quest, an arsenal of firearms and weapons of the moulded plastic variety and a goodly gangplank for disposing of their countless up-to-no-good enemies (recognised by their dressing in black or being on the extensive hit-list). 

Nanny was first on this hit-list they had chalked up on the blackboard in the cabin, for her part in the draining of the family alcohol stores jointly with Cook and the second citation on the charge sheet was her unwarranted meanness on the quantity of toast "soldiers" with boiled eggs at Tea.

The boys had gradually over the weeks stuffed many "borrowed" tins of food into the lockers, ensuring they would not starve in their many months at sea.

Over twenty five years later, Sherlock would be opening those tins between shooting up speedballs of heroin and cocaine. Another era, long after Sherry and to a great extent, William, had ceased to exist. 

But it was good luck for Sherlock, that the boys laid in those stocks so many years before.

.............

In truth, Sherry thought he was getting a bit old for all this pirate stuff, but Mycroft  
was really keen and did most of the legwork, ironic given his later lassitude and didn't seem to mind Sherrinford ordering him around, though Sherry suspected some of that was to impress William. Which really wasn't necessary, as William followed Mycroft like a small shadow, just as Sherlock's own equally strange son, an unfortunate child saddled with an even more bizarre name, would one day do to his father.

Mycroft had most of the hard work, also, as he was a better swimmer than Sherrinford, so he was tasked with fixing the support struts for the gang-plank into the side of the boat. The water was freezing cold, and sensibly Mycroft limited how long he went in it for and kept some dry clothes on the river bank to change into once he was out. Sherry was a decent swimmer, but not as good as Mycroft. 

William was learning to swim, but really needed arm band floaties still, only being four. And the water was too cold for him here. He only swam when they went to the swimming baths. He liked it then, because there was a small though not very clean cafe and when he went swimming there he got a doughnut afterwards, licking the sugar from the surface of the doughnut and then stuffing his cheeks with the squidgey treat. He looked rather like a wild-eyed black hamster. 

Mycroft had, by now, already started to limit his own food intake, conscious of a tendency to put on the pounds and wishing to take control in this, as in all things. It was so unfair that he alone inherited that tendency, but such was life, so instead of eating himself, he would take his pleasure in watching his little brother eat, since William never put on any weight. It was almost as good as eating it himself, the sheer joy the little boy exhibited. 

William could indulge in all the things that Mycroft couldn't allow himself to have. And Mycroft could watch him eat, which gave him a warm feeling inside, of comfort, hugs and damp warm sugary kisses.

..........

Mycroft was a different person back then. He was probably born a century - or more - too late. It is a very hard thing, he might reasonably have concluded, to be born out of your natural era. He was a young England before the Conquest and an innocent England before the Great War and a hopeful England before the modern world meant that the old ways were cast aside. Independent, optimistic and committed to doing his duty for his family and his country. 

He was optimistic, yes, then, he really was. What changed him, what removed the optimism, came seven years later; when he went up to Oxford, when that first summer, in Trinity Term, his oblivious parents decided to engage a well-qualified tutor or two, for the bored and disruptive eleven-year-old Sherlock. And what happened within a few weeks, exploded Mycroft's life into a million sharp pieces, all of them traumatic and none ever able to be reassembled in the same way as before.

Then was when he finally closed the door on human relationships ever being allowed to dominate his life, except for his sole exception, his relationship with his now fragmented and disturbed, suicidal little brother. 

But the earlier part of the moulding of the Ice Man; extraordinarily, that had already happened, and it came at a much younger age. Eleven years old, to be precise, when that gang-plank was built and those pirate accoutrements were stockpiled.

...............

Mycroft wondered, later, whether there was something cursed about his family and the number eleven? Both what happened to Sherry, when Mycroft was eleven and what happened to William, when Bee was eleven. Mycroft wasn't a superstitious man, but he made an exception for this number in his affairs. He wondered it though, when he was alone, which was almost always.

Anthea asked about it once, after noticing a wince at seeing the number, but the look of raw pain that crossed Mycroft's face as her words came out, meant that she left the room before he felt he even had to answer and she never, ever, raised the subject again. She also made doubly sure that the number was seen as little as possible in any documentation. Not always possible, of course, but adhered to in flight and hotel reservations, at least.

Anthea didn't know too much about Sherry, though she knew both of his existence and that he existed no longer. She also knew a little about what had befallen Sherlock, since her father, who had been in the Service before her, had assisted in arranging for a former maths tutor to meet with "accidental" carbon monoxide poisoning on a holiday canal boat near Devizes.

...........

Back to the story. To that summer when it was Mycroft who was eleven years old. 

When three became two.

............

One might think, that for different but terrible tragedies to befall a single family twice in one generation was unlikely and statistically that was certainly the case. 

Their parents, well-meaning but distracted, blamed themselves less with Sherry, than they did with William; but in both cases the guilt of inattention ran deep and after William's life dissolved into a sea of unspeakable tears, Mrs Holmes permanently abandoned her attempts to take up the academic reins again. 

She gave it up for her remaining children and busied herself, away from her own distress and dark thoughts, in a thick dusty veneer of church flower rotas and old folks Harvest hampers (are tins of beans in such quantities really ideal for the older digestive system, Vicar?). 

It was minutiae and it passed the time, and it was a distraction from thinking too much. It unfortunately also provided a distraction from seeing what was happening to her youngest boy for far, far too many long weeks.

Mr Holmes was different and simply drifted, from quiet and loving husband and father-bear of his pack, to a new version of the same, but a version that was sadder, flatter; defeated by the evils that lurk in this world and which inexplicably chose to visit two of his own darling cubs. 

Never the best communicator, he had lost one son altogether and now his youngest son was lost to him, beset by demons the boy could not even speak of, let alone his father exorcise for him. 

He could barely look William in the eye, not because of disgust at what William had been manipulated into doing, though it was utterly disgusting; but because he had seen those eyes full of mischief and joy. Now, when he looked in them, it was like staring into a bottomless pool of empty, hollow angry darkness.

...................

Sometimes, many years later from those events that summer, when Mycroft was forced to tell his parents whitewashed versions of the latest horrors that defined Sherlock's sordid and tortured existence, Mr Holmes wondered if Sherrinford hadn't in fact been luckier than Sherlock?

Sherry had been there and then gone. Sherry didn't have to live with the pain that Sherlock bore, every minute of every day. 

Mr Holmes knew that if it wasn't for his wife, he himself could not have borne it, either. She had found him once shortly after William's hell had been exposed; he was in the summerhouse, before it was pulled down, with his own father's World War Two army pistol shoved in his mouth, using his left hand to write scribbled suicide notes to his family. The pistol was loaded. The safety was off. John Watson was not the first person in Sherlock Holmes' life to feel the cold metallic taste of a loaded gun barrel between his teeth. 

Mrs Holmes had, with the skills she had acquired during her undercover operations in the Seventies, disarmed her husband expertly and swiftly. The summerhouse was gone within days, the site covered by a log store, and the collection of guns and antique militaria taken away by the police and various local museums. 

The incident was never repeated and they never spoke of it again. 

But Mr Holmes, when first meeting John Hamish Watson, saw in that man's eyes a pain and possibility for explosive self-destruction that he recognised immediately. 

As a result, he treated John not with suspicion, even when Sherlock suffered from the catastrophic effects of John's simmering fury, but instead with care and gentleness. 

He knew what it was like, to be this close to pulling the trigger.


	3. Darkness Falls

It was a sunny morning that day, when the world changed at the Manor and turned the Holmes' collective consciousness from bright day to blackest night. 

William was being a "pain", according to Sherry, who didn't like school work, but liked it even less when he had to explain to the beaks, why William had scribbled in all of his prep books over the vac.

'You should control him better, Myc. He listens to you. If I tell him not to do something, he just looks away and rolls his eyes, like a puppy that's crapped on the carpet.'

Mycroft just frowned and concentrated on his own prep, which he had more sense than to leave within reach of the pint-sized felt-tip fiend.

'He's just always bored if he isn't involved in something, Sherry. Anyway, you're just lucky he hasn't actually crapped on your carpet. He's done it twice in my room - the poo experiment thing again, he said. I trod in it the first time. Now, I have to look before I get out of bed.

I know he's maddening, Sherry. But I've still said he can come down to the houseboat this morning.'

'Really?' Sherry scowled. 'Do we have to look after him? Why can't the staff do it? It's what they're bloody paid for, isn't it? Looking after the Poo Monster?'

Mycroft grimaced. 

‘Nanny's on a half day and Cookies got "one of her heads". In other words, a hangover.'

'Okay, but you're looking after him, Myc. If he gets in my way, I'm chucking him in.'

'You can't do that Sherry. He's only four. He isn't a good enough swimmer yet!'

'Dont tempt me. He'll soon learn when he has to.....'

Mycroft took this as a half-joke. His brother was rough with William, but hadn't ever been cruel or reckless.

............

After breakfast, when William irritated Sherrinford further, by refusing to eat anything other than butter and sugar, then only when Mycroft dug it out of the dish with a teaspoon, they all got into their wet weather gear. They headed down the lawns, through the meadow, towards the private backwater of the River Avon that lay at the edge of the Holmes land. 

About fifteen of the twenty acres lay here at the rear of the property, so the grounds were verdant and the sense of freedom intoxicating. If they didn't want to be found, it was easy for the children to hide here. And no-one in the house would ever hear anything going on down at the river. 

It was in the days before mobiles were widespread, but there wouldn't have been any reception anyway, not with the river valley and the trees. A not-spot.

So, concerned for safety, the Holmes parents had installed several life-rings on  
hooks along the river bank, and on board the houseboat there was an ancient German army field telephone, all black Bakelite and furious winding-up. It worked, after a fashion, but took about five minutes of hard effort for a few seconds of coherent speech to be heard the other end. 

Sherry annoyed the nanny by always using thick German or Russian accents when he answered it. Mostly the German accents were copied from watching " 'Allo 'Allo", the spoof UK TV comedy about incompetent Resistance fighters in Occupied France in World War Two... Sherry had been sent to bed without tea more than once, so far this summer, for screeching at Nanny about the Affair of the stolen painting of the "Fallen Madonna with the Big Boobies" by Van Klompf.......he was completely unrepentant.

Mycroft, ever the dutiful brother, made sure he had William's life-jacket with him as they wandered down to the river. He and Sherry didn't bother as a rule, but William always had to wear his, as a condition of their parents allowing him to roam on the river with his brothers.

.................

Mycroft was by now regretting giving in to William's food fads. He was, by anyone's definition, hyperactive even by the time they left the house and by the time they had tramped down to the houseboat, he was positively buzzing; running in great loops, pretending to be a fighter plane, crashing into his brothers' legs as they tried to carry the food for their lunch, as well as additional materials for the project.

'Oi! You aggravating little shit! If you do that again....'

Sherry was less than impressed.

Mycroft had some sympathy, this time. 

'William. Come here and hold my hand now, unless you want to be sent back to the house this minute. Remember what Daddy said about the river?'

William made a face.

Of course I remember, Myc. "No running, no diving, no skipping, no games, no wandering off, no swimming without you two. Oh, and no plops in the water or on the riverbank."

‘And I'll add one more’, said Mycroft. ‘No “fighter bombers"!’

'Oh', said William. Then he looked hopeful.

'Fighter glider?'

'No. Fighter nothing. Airborne nothing. We no longer wish to act as your Dresden or dams for your Dambuster raids. Look, have a sausage roll and sit on the grass where I can see you.'

A small hand came out and grasped the greasy snack. Cook might have an intimate relationship with the cooking sherry, but she could cook a tidy sausage roll. Stuffing it in, mouth full, William grinned, showing a gappy toothed mouth and a lot of pink and browny white half chewed pastry and sausage filling. Mycroft wondered just why he loved this disgusting horror as much as he did? Thinking about it, though, just made him love Bee more.

Despite William's playing around, they made good progress that morning and after a couple of hours, Sherry, eyepatch and cutlass brandished, declared that William could finally come aboard. 

.........

William eyed the well-armed pirate brother suspiciously. 

'Dont push me in. I'm not getting on if you push me in.'

'I won't let him, Bee.'

Mycroft was behind William. He had a half-hearted pirate outfit on, committing to the clothing but without the extra plastic arsenal of weaponry. Neither he nor William had the flashy boots to complete their costumes.

William smiled up at his brother. 

''Kay!'

He hopped aboard the boat, followed slowly by Mycroft.

...............

Several hours later the boys were busy fending off an imaginary hoarde of Goths, Visigoths and Huns from the outer reaches of the Roman Empire. They weren't entirely sure of the logic of defending the Roman Empire using a pirate ship. Or where exactly the pirates fitted into the whole Romano-British social structure and villa culture. 

But for the sake of a good sea battle, they were willing to gloss over such minor discrepancies and give unlikely named Roman generals a good hiding when they tried to board the good ship.

When they tired of repelling imaginary boarding parties, they sat down on the deck and opened up the by-now rather squashed-looking sandwiches and cake. Cook was always a fairly good stick when it came to naval rations, much better than their meals up at the house, mainly on the basis that the three would be out of her hair for a fair few hours, on the strength of the quality of her victuals.

William as usual played with his food more than he ate it, licking fillings from sandwich bread and icing from cakes. He wriggled so much that Mycroft made a mental note to ask Nanny to check if he had worms. That was one job for the paid staff, he concluded. Especially as William would fight like a wildcat if anyone tried to do anything he didn't like. Visits to the barber were always a pretty extreme experience, let alone the dentist. Bribery was usually the only effective solution.

...........

After they had eaten, they went pond-dipping by the edge of the river backwater and the pools nearby. Sherry threw sticklebacks at Mycroft and stuffed frogspawn down his polo shirt. William would have been struck with this curse too, had Mycroft not bravely acted as a human spawn shield.

 

It was heading for tea time. Soon time to go in for supper. They were wet and pleasantly tired. An ordinary day near Bath, for three rather spoiled and peculiar children. 

Sherry suggested one final pirate fight. Mycroft wasn't keen, but William whined until he gave in. 

'Half an hour. No more. Then in, and supper and bath and bed for you, Bee.'

The toothy grateful grin he received was worth all the plastic sword-swipes he knew were coming his way. 

............

 

He wasn't able to say, afterwards. When he was asked, afterwards, by the nice policeman, the nice judge-type man and by his nice parents.

No. 

It wasn't possible for Mycroft to say exactly, just why he forgot to make sure that William was wearing his lifejacket, when they went back on board the houseboat and re-started the battle. 

It might have been because Sherrinford started attacking him with the bow and arrow, before Mycroft had barely got on board the ship. 

It might have been, that he was thinking of his prep, and specifically of an especially tricky geometry problem that he had been turning over in his mind for most of the afternoon.

And William didn't remind him. Because William knew that William was completely indestructible and untouchable. It's like that when you're four. 

............

The outcome of this, was that the battle raged fiercely without the required infant armour. No "barren straits of barren land", or "broken chancels", as with Morte D'Arthur, but they could still pretend they were Arthurian knights, having abandoned the Romans as "dull" after a matter of hours due to the lack of real lions for their gladiatorial contests (though Sherry did like being the Emperor and doing the thumbs-up thing).

They had fun, for a while and then things got a bit rough. That wasn't unusual. And shouldn't have been a problem, necessarily. But calamity can come by chance.

So, by that chance, somehow, again Mycroft wasn't sure exactly how, maybe there was a slippery section of deck planks, Sherry lost his footing when attacking the main cabin where Mycroft was hiding out. There was a huge splash and Mycroft hearing it, burst out of the cabin to see only a deserted deck and Sherry in the water, spluttering and shouting. 

Mycroft was all set to dive in and rescue his brother. But suddenly, he looked around. 

No William? 

He shouted to Sherry.

'I'm coming in! But where's Bee, Sherry?'

Sherry seemed to be struggling in the freezing water, his wide topped cuffed pirate boots filled with water and weighing him down in a way he couldn't have thought possible, but managed to call out. 

'He tried to stop me falling in. He went in too, Myc....'

.............

A cold dread spread through Mycroft. He realised only now, that little Bee had no life-jacket on. He was four. He could only swim properly in a pool and then only a width. And Mycroft couldn't see him. He couldn't hear him. Not anywhere.

Cold dread clung to him and tried to paralyse his limbs. He started to shake. He shook his head. Concentrate, Holmes. Focus. Act.

He grabbed the nearest life-ring from the side of the wheelhouse and dived into the freezing water, without hesitation. 

Sherry was yelling at Mycroft to get him out. His head was disappearing under the water every so often, now and his teeth were chattering hard. 

Mycroft knew his older brother wasn't going to stay afloat much longer. But he had to find William......... He had to. 

He was so little.

............

He dived now, close to Sherry, who tried to grab him. But he twisted free and dived deeper. That would haunt him, after. He didn't find any trace of William at first. He dived again, working his way along the hull of the boat. He could hear Sherry's faint cries above him, muffled through the water. 

Then, at last, he saw a small, dark still shape, tangled in some weed right down at the river bed. He surfaced, took a deep breath and dived once more and located William, unconscious and tangled up in the weeds. 

He dragged him free of the clinging vegetation, brought him up to the surface and at last, to the river bank. He climbed out, completely exhausted and laid his little brother on the bank. His own breath came in great heaving efforts and he felt nausea rising.

He tried to clear William's airways and sat him up, clapping him on the back to expel water from his lungs. For the longest time nothing happened and his brother stayed pale and blue and lifeless. 

At long last he got a response; William coughed up water and opened his eyes. He started to cry.

'Stay there. Sherry's in the water too. Don't move an inch. We'll be back in a second.'

And the exhausted Mycroft dived in once more. 

He swam around the side of the houseboat. 

He was met by a silent, dark, still pool. 

There was no sign of his brother. 

Everything was quiet. Even the small brown birds in the thickets along the bank, who had been singing, had all now stopped. 

............

Mycroft yelled Sherry's name. He swam up and down frantically, hysterically. He dived, countless times. He screamed his name. He dived again. He yelled again. Screamed. Praying for a response. 

It was only long minutes later, when he heard a pitiful crying back on the river bank and Mycroft swam back around to the bank-side of the houseboat, near to where he had left William; that he saw his little brother grizzling and pointing to something near the prow of the boat. A hulking waterlogged shape, face-down in the black water. 

In a pirate costume. 

A broad-browed boy, a confident boy, a seemingly indestructible life-force, now floating lifeless in the dark waters.

Mycroft screamed. No one heard except William and he just cried more pathetically than ever. The woodland animals heard, the water voles and an otter and all the tiny translucent fish, but they could not help the strange human child or his whimpering small charge. They scampered away, scared by the noise.

Mycroft clutched his hair in agony, scratching at his own face as he dragged his fingers down it......and then he sucked in a huge wracking breath and dived in one final time, getting hold of the shape and dragging it, with difficulty from exhaustion, to the river bank. It was incredibly heavy, waterlogged like this. 

"Deadweight", he thought, and it made him feel utterly, hopelessly sick.

Once back on dry land, he tried the same procedure with Sherry as he had with William. William, who was still crying in a way only very young children can, an endless wail of tears and snot. William, who kept asking Mycroft when Sherry was going to stop playing and wake up.....

.............

After some minutes of his childish attempts at reviving his brother, Mycroft realised that it wasn't going to work. And that he probably should have called for help sooner. The vomit came easily then and he shouted at William, when the little boy looked scared, seeing his heroic protector emptying his guts all over the ground.

He yelled at William to stay where he was and staggered back on the houseboat, where he wound up the army telephone, which process took so very long, so agonisingly longer than it had ever seemed to before. 

Finally, after a long wait, he was able to ring through to the Manor house. After a few moments when Cook thought it was a practical joke, his faltering voice and the fact it was Mycroft and not the mischievous Sherry speaking, convinced her; she listened and then she screamed like a banshee. 

..............

Mummy came quickly to the telephone, then and Mycroft had to tell the same story. He was whispering by the end, and had to repeat his words. Still, Mummy struggled to hear what he was saying. 

Once she understood what he said and could not unhear it, she moaned a low cry that Mycroft decided he never, ever, wanted to hear anyone utter again. It was the primitive cry of a mother who has just lost a child. Lost them suddenly, pointlessly and cruelly.

When Mycroft in future years heard that same bloodcurdling cry again, on news reports of massacres or genocide, he instinctively hit the mute button. He could order someone's death, without hesitation or emotion, if he thought it necessary to protect the lives of innocent others, or to punish a murderer or abuser; but the cries of the innocent mother at the loss of a child were much, much too close to home.

His later actions in respect of "Mary Morstan" could be viewed in this context, perhaps. A degree of mercy, where none might have been expected to have been found.

..............

After that, it was just a haze. They all came. All the people who come, when things happen that shouldn't ever, ever happen. 

There were wailing ambulances with flashing lights which hurt William's stinging eyes and they took poor drowned Sherry away, once they had tried and failed to revive him at the scene. They were still trying in the ambulance but they didn't look hopeful. Perhaps it was more for show. 

William wanted to see Sherry but no one would let him see his brother. 

There were stern-looking policemen and ladies, who were kind, but sort of scary and who wanted Mycroft to describe what had happened, even though he couldn't describe it, because he couldn't speak now, not at all; he was wet through and shivering. 

And there was a doctor, who when he had arrived, sternly told off those police officers and said they would have to wait to speak to Mycroft, used words like "deep shock" and "no fit state".

For all that time, William was sitting huddled up in a fleece blanket, naked underneath as all his clothes were soaked; Mycroft had a blanket too, but he wouldn't remove his clothes, because he wasn't four like Bee was. Then the doctor said he had to go to bed, into warm dry clothes and Mycroft found he couldn't walk either, so that was speaking and walking now both beyond him.

So now he was being carried up to the house by Daddy and the gardener. William close behind, wrapped in his blanket, looking pale and disorientated, being carried by the doctor. 

Then Mummy, stumbling along, being helped by a policewoman. Mummy was crying pitifully now, in the manner of someone who knows that part of their life has been taken from them; that for the rest of their life they will have to live on only part-formed, experiencing a half-life. That nothing anyone could say in words of comfort, could alter that or change it.

It was haunting to hear her choking, gasping sobs fading, as they progressed in a slow and sombre procession up towards the house.

...............

They put Mycroft and William into Mycroft's room, together in Mycroft's bed, for their comfort, once Mycroft had dried off and changed. And Mummy was there too, now lying on the sofa by the window so she could see both of her surviving boys every time she broke off from crying and opened her eyes. 

Mycroft had seen the doctor giving Mummy something, some tablets and she swallowed them with some water. Mycroft wished someone would offer him some tablets, too, but nobody did. He gripped Bee's small thin body tighter to him. 

It was Daddy, brave, strong, quiet Daddy, who was forced to perform the worst duties. 

It was Daddy who was at the hospital, when the official acknowledgement was made, that all the resuscitation attempts on Sherrinford had been unsuccessful. 

Daddy who confirmed identification of his eldest son, his first-born, the Holmes heir. 

And Daddy who was given Sherrinford's personal effects in a prosaic and hateful plastic bag; his digital Casio watch with the calculator buttons that you could (and Sherry did) write BOOBS on if you turned the screen upside down; his blunt penknife and compass, and perhaps most poignant of all, a rather saucy crumpled-up picture of a page 3 topless lovely from the "Sun" newspaper. 

There was also a St Christopher necklace from around Sherry's neck; the patron saint of travellers. Sherry had planned to travel all over the world. His parents gave him the St Christopher to protect him. They never guessed that the Saint might let him and them down so badly, so very close to home.

Mummy left the boys later that night once Mr Holmes returned, but Mycroft could hear them crying in their room, when he got up in the night to use the toilet. He had to take William with him to the loo, because Bee became hysterical as Mycroft tried to get out of bed. So he trailed his little brother along too, holding his hand and sat him on his knee as he went about his bodily business. 

Bee said he didn't need the toilet, insisted he didn't; but when Mycroft woke in the morning, the bed was soaked and William was shivering in wet pants. Mycroft bathed him and dressed him in warm, dry pyjamas, and then sat William on the sofa facing him, while he stripped the bedclothes and made the bed up with fresh sheets. 

Then he sat down himself and William climbed onto his knee, his skinny arms around Mycroft's neck, head snuggled under his chin and they sat there for the longest time, hours probably, Mycroft's thumb stroking across his little brother's bony little back in a rhythmic, soothing pattern. Both of them were shaking. 

..................

It was almost noon before they broke apart and they did not leave each other's sight for almost a month. William slept with Mycroft for the best part of a year. Mummy was concerned for Mycroft because William still wasn't dry at nights for most of that time, but Mycroft wanted his brother there. And wanted to do everything for William, having failed to do everything for Sherrinford.

.............

Afterwards, much later afterwards, when time, sleep and the intrusion of the outside world continuing regardless, had dulled the events into a gnawing ache, instead of the initial acute agony, Mycroft did speak with the police. 

He explained everything clearly, as far as he could, being eleven, about how the tragedy came about. 

About how there were his two brothers in the water suddenly and how he tried to rescue both. That he tried to save the younger one, who couldn't swim, first. That he thought Sherry could hang on, would make it, until Mycroft could get him. That William took longer to regain consciousness than he'd hoped and by the time he could look for Sherry, there was no Sherry left to save. 

That his heavy pirate captain costume had taken him under, especially his boots. He had been so proud of the boots. Mycroft and William didn't have any, Mycroft explained, they had to wear wellies. Only Sherry, only their captain.

That he tried to do his best, but though he did his best, it wasn't good enough. 

He was reassured by well-meaning adults of all types, that there was nothing he could have done. That he was, in fact, a hero for saving William at all and that he had made a logical and rational decision in an impossible situation. 

Without him, both his brothers would probably have drowned. Certainly, in fact. He should be proud of himself.

He did not tell them what he really remembered most.

....................

They meant to make him feel proud, and not ashamed.

But inside, Mycroft was being eaten away by the guilt of hearing his older brother's screams and cries, begging for Myc to get him out. And of that moment, that split-second, now infinitely stretched in his memory, of deliberately turning away from him, batting his flailing arms away, even; to reach and rescue William. 

To choose William. 

Because that's what he'd done, wasn't it? He could rescue only one brother for certain and he made sure that one was his darling Bee. 

And he left Sherry to take his chances. Left him to struggle and beg and then, ultimately, left him to drown and to die in the dark water, the clutching weeds and the suffocating mud.

..............

Mycroft and William did not go to Sherry's funeral. William had bad flu and was still wetting the bed, a humiliation which would revisit him with a vengeance that later hot summer when it was his turn to be eleven and the Manor became his personal prison. 

Mycroft did not have flu, but it was still thought unwise for him to attend. His parents were concerned about their middle son's clear struggle to manage his memories about the events on the river. 

So Mycroft and William were given their breakfast by Cook and then silently watched from an upstairs window, their food untouched, as their pale-faced parents left. And then, later, they watched them return, now paler still.

And Mycroft held Bee to him, the whole time they were away, stroking his hair and telling him that no harm would ever, EVER, be permitted to come to his only remaining brother.

..............

So when, a quarter century later, Sherlock Holmes, blackmailed into unwilling fatherhood by a Mycroft fashioned by these events, as well as later ones, threw him the cruel accusation that Sherry "could have done it instead", that he was straight and he could have produced a Holmes heir if Mycroft "hadn't done what he did"; it was perhaps surprising, not that Mycroft threatened him, but that Mycroft's reaction was limited to verbal threats if he ever again repeated those words. 

It was a mark, a sad reflection, really; of how controlled and cold the elder Holmes brother had become, that he was physically able to avoid striking his accuser, when faced with that level of blithe, unknowing provocation.

..........

In reality, while Jonathan Lang, Sherlock's childhood abuser, was Mycroft Holmes' first deliberate assassination, Mycroft always, in his own mind, counted additionally, one earlier death. 

Not deliberate assassination, perhaps, but as he termed it, assassination by favouritism. By choosing. 

No wonder, too; that Mycroft, after that terrible day by the river; chose to envelope his only remaining sibling with a protective embrace, which lasted fully until Mycroft went up to university at seventeen.

 

And no wonder at all, then, that the devastation that swiftly followed Mycroft's enforced loosening of these ties, had led to a lifetime of misplaced guilt and smothering supervision from older brother to younger. Mycroft simply could not lose William, or later Sherlock, because he had lost one brother already. The guilt was crushing from both his brothers' calamities and led him to devote his own energies entirely to the controllable, the logical and the unemotional. 

His parents barely recognise the son they had known before that day. 

...........

Every year, on the anniversary of Sherry's death, Mycroft visits Sherrinford's grave at the Manor. 

He lays flowers, and he apologises to his brother. He sits heavily and quietly on the nearby carved green oak bench and then he cries openly. He brings large cotton handkerchiefs for this eventuality, being prepared. He does not take his phone, or his laptop and he dispenses with all the normal security detail. He usually stays all morning. No one disturbs him. Anthea makes sure of it.

His parents expect these annual visits and make themselves scarce. They wait until he leaves before they make their own poignant pilgrimage. They are here much more often, of course. One day, Sherlock will have hives of his beloved bees to tell all his news to, but for his parents, it is Sherry's grave where they go, to pass on tidings and gossip and world events. He was such a vibrant and lively boy. They worry constantly that he finds it too quiet and dull here, with only the trees rustling in the wind for company. 

...........

Before Mycroft leaves, he touches the large marble raised tomb. It is a replica of the pirate ancestor's memorial, of the tomb in Egypt and seemed suitable for a boy pirate. And he says out loud the words of a poem:

'It is not words could pay you what I owe'.

He knows the guilt and the regret, however illogical, will be with him forever. 

..........

Sherlock never comes. Sherlock won't come, he can't come, near enough to the Manor to draw close to Sherry's grave. Mycroft understands this and knows that the Manor is utterly toxic to his Bee.

And Mycroft has never told Sherlock and he never will; that he chose between his elder brother's life and William's own. Sherlock's memories were hazy, he was young, barely conscious and in shock. 

Mycroft thinks it better this way, especially after events in William's own life give his precious Bee his own heavy burdens to carry, on his slender and shaky shoulders. 

This burden, then, like so many others, Mycroft carries alone; accompanied only by his elder brother's ghost and the unnatural still quietness of the Manor, that settled like a winter mist once he was gone.

He hears Sherry's laughs and shouts still, when he comes to this place, though. Faintly, almost just the sound of the wind in the trees, but there, when Mycroft turns his head. 

He wonders if Sherry will haunt this place still, once they are all dead. When they are all finally gone? 

.................

Mycroft Holmes asks, in his will, to be buried here, next to his brother, when the time comes. He hopes that he might offer Sherry constant companionship in the next life, in a way he was not able to do in this. So that Sherry won't be alone here any more. Sherlock has John, now, but Sherry has no one. 

This, then, is Mycroft's last vow.

 

The End. 

 

PARTA QUIES

"Goodnight; ensured release,  
Imperishable peace,  
Have these for yours,  
While sea abides, and land  
And earth's foundations stand,  
And heaven endures.

When earth's foundations flee.  
Nor sky nor land nor sea  
At all is found,  
Content you, let them burn;  
It is not your concern;  
Sleep on, sleep sound.

AE Housman


End file.
